Happy New Year and #MyWishIn2013 For Your Business Blog

It's the first day of the rest of our lives…well, 2013 at least, and this is the best time to greet you and your business a surfeit of clients and profits in the new year.

To that end, we both know your business blog will continue to figure in your online marketing strategies this 2013 (hopefully!) so I've a handful of wishes for it.

They're not exactly wishes, heh. More like To Dos to boost your business' (and blog's) authority and rankings both with your market and the search engines.

For 2013, I wish your business blog will have more of these:

1. Targeted traffic! 

Of course, it's what every business blog wants - people who're looking for information that only you can provide, and people ready to buy whatever you have on offer.

2. Useful, remarkable, unique and new product/service information. 

People (and search engines!) look for knowledge that will help take the pain away from whatever headaches they're having in their lives. With the proliferation of websites offering the same solutions that you're recommending, the best way to attract potential clients to your site and keep them coming again and again is one-of-a-kind advice that specifically hits their emotional hot buttons as well as nukes each one swiftly and satisfactorily.

Holiday Shopping Online in the US (Infographic)

Last time, the Work-at-Home Maven suggested 12 Christmas blog post ideas to write for your business blog this season. In it, I included some Christmas shopping statistics that bear thinking about.

Well, while I was researching for that blog post, I found a great infographic that distills the historical predilections of online shoppers during major holidays--Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Christmas shopping--from 2005 to 2010.

12 Christmas Blog Post Ideas For Your Business Blog

Christmas is just around the corner and in case you haven't noticed, there's been some subtle hat tip to the approaching holidays on this blog, heh. But lest you slack off and let go of blogging for your business this coming Christmas season, let me remind you:

There's no rest for the business blogger...
especially during the Christmas holidays!

That's because Christmas is still the best season for giving and you'd want to take advantage of this opportunity to grab a bit of the Christmas spending pie for your business.

Christmas Spending Statistics

You've probably seen in past years how sales picked up at a furious rate during the holiday seasons so you won't need convincing but just for fun, let's see what's in store for online marketers this Christmas 2012:

• US shoppers plan to spend an average of $854 for gifts this holiday season, up from $646 from 2011. 
• From these, 45% will buy gifts online, planning to spend $1,245. Forty percent will shop from catalogs and other direct marketers and they plan to spend about $808.
• Most shoppers surveyed will wait for sales (54%) but 18% says they'll pay at full price while 28% will do either depending on what kind of gift or how much it'll cost.
• In 2011, about 90% of consumers shopped online, spending $52 billion from November 1 to December 16, 2011.
• Last year, online shoppers bought the following things: clothes and electronics (51.4%), toys (32.6%), gift cards (23.1%), and home décor (21.3%).

Tweaking My Blogger Blog

Blogger is a free platform and for work-at-home mavens like me who needs all the money we can save,  we can still have our own personal domain and still enjoy free hosting.

The trouble is, Blogger isn’t as easily customized as a self-hosted WordPress blog. With a little Google research and a lot of errors (especially if you’re not as expert in CSS/HTML tweaking as me), you can still personalize a Blogger blog to suit your, er, designer bent.

I’m going to show you some of the customizations I did for this blog to make it look like this current incarnation:

CAUTION: 
Please, please, puhleeeease: before you insert any of these changes, back up your template. (I won't be responsible for any error if you don't!)

1. Click on Template, choose Edit HTML, Proceed to the Template Editor and then Expand Widget Templates. 
2. Place your cursor inside the Template Editor, click Ctrl+A to highlight every single piece of code, then click Ctrl+C to copy everything to the clipboard.
3. Open Notepad, paste (Ctrl+V) the whole stuff, and save the document to finish.

Writing for Freight Broker Training – Top 3 Lessons in Business Blogging

I recently found a gig on oDesk writing for a freight broker training blog. It’s exciting work because (1) it feeds my thirst to learn, and (2) I’m discovering things about business blogging that I normally wouldn’t have if I’m just ghostwriting an ebook.

Writing an ebook is a one-off thing, so learning stuff will only be for a short period of time...unless you start liking the topic and you end up having a passion for it. Blogging, on the other hand, is more or less an on-going activity, so learning is also continuous.

image by trucktrend.com

Tooting My Horn

But first, since this is a portfolio blog, Imma gonna list down the recent articles I wrote for the blog:

Top 7 Ways Journaling Can Boost Your Business Blogging Groove

Starting a business blog—in fact, any blog at all—is easy. Updating it regularly and consistently with fresh content isn’t.

That’s because maintaining a blog requires focus, creativity, and a lot of energy. You need these long after the excitement of doing something new wears thin. I always have to bribe myself with my favorite Korean drama just to sit down and come up with something new to upload to this site.

Coming up with blog post ideas make keeping a blog doubly difficult if you don’t have a plan for the next 52 weeks of posts. There’s a way to get around this hurdle though.

The Benefits of Journaling

One of the main things that keeps me blogging is my journaling habit. Every day—or every other day, when there are lots of deadlines to meet and errands to keep—I whip out my trusty notebook to scribble anything I could think of.

The Art of {Business} Blogging

Penny Power, founder of social business network Ecademy, shares some pointers on the art of blogging in this video:

Main takeaways:

Top 3 Ways A Business Blog Can Improve Your Bottom Line

You’re reading this article right now because you're curious about business blogs and you want to know you one can help you get new customers, improve sales and generally grow your company. A business partner or an employee may have suggested putting up one so you can get your brand out there.

But what’s a blog, you ask, and why should you care?

What’s In A Business Blog

Blog is Net speak for web log, a website that’s updated regularly, where the articles are arranged in chronological order, and some form of interaction is possible—usually through the comments section. It’s the real-world counterpart of daily journals and diaries.

Writers and diarists pioneered blogging but there’s a world of difference between personal blogs and business blogs. Personal blogs publish highly subjective posts that reflect the blogger’s views, beliefs, and opinions. You’d often find spirited debates going on in the comments because of the many perspectives that come with so many people sharing their (equally subjective) thoughts.

Monday Mashups Episode 1

Beginning this week, I’ll be sharing a mashup of tips and advice from the experts on how to be better at business blogging, search engine optimization, social media marketing and inbound marketing. Reading on the Web isn’t as easy as reading a real-world, printed, magazine article so I’m keeping the resource links to less than 10 (wfc).

Top takeaways this week:

• Google’s tightening the noose on search results so that you only get quality SERPs when you look for stuff. The company’s recent target: exact match domains.
• Social media has an influence on search results...and although it’s an emerging trend, there’s no time like the present to take advantage of the opportunities it presents.

The first edition of Monday Mashups:

The Exact Match Domain Playbook: A Guide and Best Practices for EMDs. Ranking better on Google with an exact match domain (EMD) for your website or blog has just become harder. Here are some best practices on how to make EMDs work for you still.

A Crystal Clear Explanation of How Social Media Influences SEO. Social search is an emerging trend and here's a step-by-step guide on how to integrate your SEO and social media strategies to get ahead of your niche.